June 20, 2008 -- At the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC) in Dresden, Germany, the InfiniBand Trade Association (IBTA) announced its latest link speed roadmap, showing expected bandwidth for the InfiniBand interconnect for years 2008-2011 and beyond.
The roadmap shows projected increased market demand for InfiniBand 1x QDR, 4x DDR, 8x DDR and 12x DDR beyond 2011, which translates to bandwidths nearing 1000 Gb/s in the next three years.
"InfiniBand is expanding beyond high-performance computing and gaining increasing adoption in general purpose enterprise computing," says Jeff Boles, technology analyst at Taneja Group. "In terms of cost effectiveness, simplicity, flexibility and performance, InfiniBand is leaps and bounds beyond the competition. With the roadmap announced today, the IBTA is showing its commitment to supporting the specification as it evolves over the next several years to meet market demand."
According to IBTA, for vendors with a stake in the interconnect business, the roadmap provides a vendor-neutral outline for the progression of InfiniBand so that they may plan their product development accordingly. For enterprise and high-performance computing end users, the roadmap provides specific milestones around expected improvements to ensure their InfiniBand investment is protected.
The roadmap, available on the IBTA Web site here, was researched and developed as a collaborative effort from the various IBTA workgroups. Members of the IBTA include leading enterprise IT vendors who are actively contributing to the advancement of InfiniBand.
Success in the high-performance computing market has driven Infiniband adoption into corporate data centers, where enterprise customers -- primarily in banking, managed hosting services, Web 2.0, insurance services and healthcare -- are using InfiniBand interconnects in a variety of enterprise and database applications. InfiniBand is also being deployed in virtualized environments to cost-effectively scale virtual machines by delivering higher LAN and SAN throughputs for virtual machines.
"The publication of this roadmap represents a commitment by industry leaders to deliver the fastest link speeds, highest-usable bandwidth and lowest-latency input/output technology available," offers Jim Pappas, IBTA steering committee co-chair. "Through the work of the IBTA and demand from end users, InfiniBand continues to strengthen its leadership as the high-speed server and storage interconnect of choice."
At ISC, the IBTA also announced that the annual InfiniBand technical forum has been planned for September 15 at Harrah's in Las Vegas, NV. The IBTA Technical Forum '08: InfiniBand and the Enterprise Data Center will include discussion on the IBTA's roadmap, as well as host presentations from end users who have deployed InfiniBand into their virtualization and database environments. John Enck, research vice president at Gartner, Inc., will provide the keynote.
End users, OEMs, hardware and software developers, system architects and product managers who would like to register for the technical forum may do so by clicking here.